The Reunion Mission (26 page)

Her daughter bobbed her head.

“Why?”

Haley poked out her bottom lip and looked away. “I took his truck.”

Annie inhaled a slow, deep breath. Counted to ten. “Go to the time-out chair. You know not to grab your brother’s toys from him.”

Her expression contrite, Haley sidled over to the chair in the corner of the room. Feeling Jonah’s gaze on her, Annie steeled her nerves and schooled her face before facing him. Rather than accusation, his expression was patient, forgiving. Her awkward guilt grew. “I’m sorry. When I saw you—”

“I understand.”

She tipped her head, studying him. “Do you? Do you have any idea how much it scares me to think of my son following his father’s example? He was a baby when I left Walt, but not a day passes that I don’t worry that Walt’s abusiveness could be genetic.”

A muscle in Jonah’s cheek twitched. “Behavior is learned, not inherited.”

“I wish I could be sure,” she murmured, shifting her gaze to Ben, who’d toddled over to cling to her leg. He whined and raised his arms to be picked up. Annie lifted Ben to her chest and bear-hugged him. “Oh, Ben, what am I going to do with you?”

Slanting her a lopsided smile, Jonah stepped closer and stroked a hand down Ben’s wavy baby hair. “You’re gonna be all right. Aren’t you, little man?”

The loving gesture stole Annie’s breath. Walt had claimed to love their kids, but she’d never seen him show his affection with a tender touch, a softly spoken encouragement or a warm smile.

Ben lifted his head from her shoulder and, grinning impishly, wagged a finger at Jonah. “No hit.”

Chuckling, Jonah caught Ben’s finger in his hand and gently squeezed. “That’s right, pal. No hitting Haley.”

Annie’s throat tightened, and she struggled to assimilate her new impressions of Jonah in the wake of the horror and gore she’d witnessed this morning at the diner. How did this caring, conscientious man fit in the landscape of violence and illegal activity she’d become embroiled in at Pop’s? How did she reconcile this gentle side of Jonah with the violent skill she’d seen him employ firsthand?

Her mind spinning, Annie nodded toward Haley. “Once she’s been in the chair two more minutes, will you bring her into the kitchen to eat?”

He tweaked Ben’s chin. “Sure.”

She backed out of the living room, knowing something fundamental had shifted in her relationship with Jonah, but too overwhelmed by the events of the morning to examine the change closely.

Their relationship? The word clanged in her head and made her stomach whirl. She didn’t have a relationship with Jonah. He was a customer at the diner, nothing more.

But you don’t kiss a man who is nothing more than a customer.

No,
he
kissed
her.
Annie’s lips tingled from the mere memory of that brief kiss. Warm, sweet, breath-stealing.

And totally off-limits. She had enough upheaval in her life at the moment without complicating matters with a new relationship. When she was ready to become involved with a man again, assuming she ever was, she’d want someone stable, safe, considerate.

Not a man who’d elbowed his way into her life, for whom hand-to-hand combat was a sport, and who turned her emotions topsy-turvy with his soul-piercing eyes.

After settling Ben in his high chair, Annie finished mixing the cheese sauce into the pasta. She was just about to check on Haley when Jonah carried her into the kitchen on his hip.

Her daughter gazed at him with such implicit trust and admiration, Annie’s heart hammered. She’d expected Haley to be much more circumspect around men following Walt’s frightening behavior both before and after Annie had left the marriage.

Not that Haley hadn’t been exposed to positive male role models, too. Riley Sinclair, her counselor Ginny’s husband, for one.

Jonah situated Haley at the table and took a bowl from the counter. “Can I help serve?”

“I—” Before she could answer, Jonah had scooped a spoonful of mac and cheese in the dish and carried it over to Haley.

“It’s too hot,” her daughter complained without tasting her lunch.

“Can’t have that.” Jonah stepped up behind Haley and bent low over the table. “Help me blow out the fire.”

Together they both blew on the bowl with their cheeks puffed, and Ben giggled.

“Me, too!” Ben’s attempt to cool his food resembled a raspberry more than a puff of breath. Now both children giggled, and Annie’s heart swelled. Her children’s mirth sang through her blood, a lyrical, magical melody that she treasured more than gold.

When Jonah peeked up and winked at her, Annie’s joy over her children’s laughter and Jonah’s rapport with the kids morphed into a knee-weakening skip in her pulse. Her children had trusted and bonded with Jonah quickly and easily. Did they sense something about him that she’d overlooked, or was he preying on their innocence and naïveté to get to her?

Before he left today, she intended to find out.

Chapter 10

J
onah was examining Haley’s baby picture on a side table in the living room when Annie finished settling the kids in for their naps. Her heart ached, knowing she’d not had a professional picture made of Ben as an infant. The early months of his life had been the tumultuous prelude to her leaving Walt, and the months since her divorce had been too financially tight, too busy with her hours at the diner to have her son’s picture made.

But she needed to capture her son’s early years on film soon, someday….

“Someday may be closer than you think.”

Though she said nothing, Jonah turned as if he sensed her standing behind him. “Your children are precious. You’ve a right to be proud of them.”

“Thank you.” She managed a small smile of appreciation, then grew serious. Time for answers. “Tell me about your childhood.”

Jonah raised his head, stood straighter, arched an eyebrow in surprise.

“You said you were abused. How bad was it? What did your mother do? How did it change who you were?”

Jonah inhaled deeply and dragged a hand along his jaw. His callused palm rasped against the shadow of beard on his chin as he released his breath slowly through pursed lips. “Wow. You know how to cut to the chase.”

He jerked his head toward the sofa she’d gotten from the secondhand store. “Sit?” He settled on one end of the couch and patted the cushion next to him.

Instead, she took the rocking chair across the room from him and squeezed the knobby armrests. “I’m listening.”

Jonah leaned forward, propping his forearms on his thighs and bridging his fingers. “I grew up in a white-collar neighborhood, went to a good school, had a circle of friends I hung out with. Most of the normal stuff.”

He shrugged. “But every once in a while my dad would lose his temper and take out his frustrations on Mom. If I tried to defend her, I’d catch as bad as she got. He generally left my older sister alone, but even she took a backhand across the mouth for a sassy remark or an ear-ringing slap if she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. As I got older, when I sensed he was in one of his moods, I’d provoke him so that he’d come after me to start with instead of Mom.

“I lied to my teachers or whoever would ask about where my bruises came from. By the time I was thirteen, I’d started picking fights with kids in the neighborhood. Part of that was me venting my internal rage, and part of it was to cover the constant parade of injuries my dad gave me. I got the reputation of being a bully on purpose, so no one questioned the black eyes and split lips as much.”

A bully.
Annie shuddered.

“And your mother? How could she let this happen to you? I left Walt when I realized he could turn his violence against our kids next.”

“She tried to protect me and got hurt for it. But she also lived in denial. Dad would apologize and beg her forgiveness, promise to change, tell her he’d get counseling and she’d stay. She loved the bastard for some reason, and I couldn’t convince her to leave him. She died of cancer when I was fifteen. My sister was away at college by then, and I had no desire to live alone with my dad, so I left home.”

Annie frowned. “And went where?”

“The streets for a while. Then I went to this gym one day, looking for work.”

“As in a
boxing
gym like the one where we met the other day?” She couldn’t hide the disdain in her tone.

He nodded. “Yeah, but in my hometown in Arkansas. For a while I did odd jobs, real menial stuff, in exchange for a cot in the locker room. Then I found out you could earn money working as a sparring partner with the guys who were training for competitions. I asked for that job and got it.”

When she sent him a dubious look, he shrugged and flashed her a self-deprecating grin. “I had plenty of experience getting beat up, so why not get paid for taking a few hits?”

Annie stared down at her lap, her hands fidgeting restlessly. While her heart ached for the teenager Jonah had been, relying on the violence that was his father’s legacy to survive, her new insights about his past only confirmed what she’d feared. Violence was a part of who he was. His casual attitude about hopping into a boxing ring to pound another man chafed against her memories of being Walt’s punching bag.

“So you turned the abuse your father taught you into a profession?” She surged from her chair and paced across the living room, uneasy with the truths she was learning. How could she be attracted to another man with a tendency toward violence? What was wrong with her?

“A profession?” He snorted. “Hardly. I just made a few bucks exchanging jabs with guys in the evening. And sparring was nothing like the abuse I took from my old man. For one thing, I wore pads and headgear.”

She spun to face him with a sigh. “My point is, when you got away from your father, rather than leave the abuse in the past, you continued fighting. It was a lifestyle for you. You
chose
to fight.”

He met her gaze evenly. “I chose to heal. I chose to turn my life around and use what I knew to help other people in the same situation.”

She blinked, gave him a humorless laugh. “Excuse me? How does sparring help other people?”

A muscle in his jaw twitched, and he took a slow, measured breath. “It doesn’t necessarily. But being a policeman does, if you do your job right.”

She sat straighter, remembering his telling her he’d once been a cop. She listened attentively as he explained.

“The thing is, the kid who went to that gym looking for work, the teenager who got into the ring to earn a few bucks isn’t the same guy sitting here today. Back then I was full of rage, full of hatred for what my father did. I was confused, alone, just...mad at the world. But the owner of the gym saw something worthwhile in me and took me under his wing. He talked to me, listened to me when I was ready to spill my guts and helped me work through that anger I had pent up inside. He showed me how that fury was destroying me, how holding on to that anger hurt
me,
not my dad.”

His words reverberated through Annie, and she hugged herself. She’d heard much of the same admonitions and advice from Ginny. Ginny had been her rock when she’d felt overwhelmed by the turmoil and danger of leaving Walt. Annie understood without his explaining further how important the owner of that gym had been for Jonah.

Jonah rubbed his palms on his jeans and continued. “He taught me to channel those bottled-up emotions and release them through my boxing. I sweated out the grief and worked off the tension and hatred. Took it out on a punching bag so that I
didn’t
blow a gasket one day and let it out on some shmuck who ticked me off. I poured all the fear and frustration and rage I had for my father and what he’d done to us into my workout and learned to fight a clean, fair fight in the ring. No cheap shots. Keeping control and perspective.

“I’d been in a downward spiral, and he pulled me back from the brink and set me on a better path.”

“How so?” Annie leaned forward, enthralled by what she was learning about Jonah’s past.

He rolled a palm up. “I went back to school, joined the police academy and was on the job for nine years before I left the force.”

Annie drew her eyebrows together and shook her head. “Why did you quit?”

Jonah flopped back on the sofa and rubbed his hands over his face. Grunted. “I guess I...answered one too many domestic disturbance calls and had had enough.”

He clenched his teeth, and the distant look in his eyes told her his thoughts were miles away from her living room, deep in troublesome memories from his years as a cop. Annie’s heart thundered as color crept up his neck and flooded his cheeks, his nostrils flared and his jaw tightened.

“Every time I’d leave a home where I knew abuse was happening, regardless of whether I’d been able to do anything to help the people involved, I’d feel that frustration knotted up inside me again, and I’d go to the gym to work through it, work it off.” He inhaled deeply and expelled it in a whoosh. “But in all the years I was a cop,” he said, meeting her eyes with a hard, level gaze, “I
never
lost my cool with an abuser—much as I wanted to knock the snot out of ’em. Never.” He paused, letting that fact sink in.

A shiver chased up Annie’s spine as all her conceptions about Jonah shattered and reassembled in new patterns. Her spinning thoughts made her restless, and she shoved to her feet, paced across the floor and back.

“So...boxing, sparring saved my life. The things I learned from Michael kept me on track, kept me sane.”

Her pulse tripped, and she jerked her head up. “Michael. You’ve mentioned him before. He’s the one you said lost his savings to the gambling ring that operates out of the diner.”

Jonah nodded. “He was my mentor, my guardian angel when I needed him. He moved down here to Lagniappe a couple years ago to manage Frank’s gym, the one we were at the other day.” He paused and drew his eyebrows into a frown. “Michael was a good man at heart, but...he was no saint. Gambling became an addiction. When he lost his savings, he...lost hope. He was ashamed and thought he was out of options.”

Annie heard the grief that vibrated in Jonah’s tone. He sucked in a deep breath and pushed it out through pursed lips. “He...killed himself just over a year ago.”

She gasped and pressed a hand to her mouth. “Oh, no. Jonah, I’m so sorry.”

His jaw tightened. “I blame the thugs who stole his money for his death. That’s how I got involved with this investigation. I wanted retribution for Michael. I wanted to shut down the bastards’ operation and bring them to justice.”

“Alone?”

He sighed and glanced away. “For the most part. Right now I’m just getting information, trying to figure out who’s involved, how the operation is run. When I have all my facts laid out, enough proof to hang these guys, I’ll take it to the authorities. But I don’t want anyone, even someone on the fringes of this thing, to get away. I want solid information, hard evidence that no judge can toss out, no lawyer can explain away.”

The passion in his voice fueled the fire inside Annie, the determination she had to free herself from the danger she’d unwittingly landed in. If she wanted to keep her kids safe, if she wanted to protect herself and still scrabble out a living, the criminals at the diner had to be stopped.

But she wouldn’t sit back and leave it to Jonah to bring the men involved to justice. She would not be a victim again, would not passively let someone ruin her life again as Walt had done.

Screwing up her courage, Annie balled her fists and pulled her shoulders back. “I want to help. I can search Hardin’s office for files or financial records, or—”

“No.” Jonah shook his head.

Irritation tickled her gut. “But I have access to his office and can—”

“No! I can’t let you get in this mess any deeper. It’s too dangerous.”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “It’s not your decision whether I’m involved or not. And I’m already in danger. You said so yourself.”

“Think of your kids, Annie. You can’t put yourself in harm’s—”

“I am thinking of my kids! The sooner we build a case against these creeps, the sooner I can get my life back.”

“Not
we.
Let me handle this. The only reason I told you what was going on is because you needed to be aware, be alert. So you could protect yourself. But now, with Hardin’s murder, the stakes are higher. I have to be careful how I proceed. Changing anything now about the cover I’ve set up might tip someone off.”

She pictured Hardin’s bullet-riddled body and almost changed her mind. The idea of being so vulnerable, with an unknown enemy lurking, lying in wait, scared her senseless. She swallowed the bitter taste of fear in her throat and raised her chin. “All the more reason to let me search Hardin’s office. You don’t have the opportunity and the access I have. I can do this. I
have
to do this. I can’t let fear or danger dictate my life again.”

Jonah surged off the couch and strode over to her. “Look, I know how much you want this all to be over, and I respect your courage and willingness to help, but—”

“Courage?” She gave him a humorless laugh. “It’s not courage, Jonah. It’s desperation. Panic. I’m scared to death, but I have to do something before the whole situation explodes in my face. If there’s even a chance I could be on their hit list because of that stolen money, I have to act. I won’t sit by and risk my children getting hurt by this. It’s necessity, not courage.”

He cupped her cheek in his massive hand and stroked her jaw with his thumb. The comforting gesture sent ribbons of sweet sensation coursing through her, muddling her thoughts.

“Don’t sell yourself short,” he murmured, his low voice stroking her, adding to the pleasant hum vibrating from deep inside her. “Leaving your husband, starting over, standing up for what’s right...you had to have a lot of courage to do all you’ve done. Being brave isn’t the absence of fear—”

“It’s doing what you must despite the fear. I know, I know.” With a disgruntled sigh and a nod, she lifted her hand to his wrist and pulled away from his deliciously distracting touch. She needed to stay focused on the problem at hand. “Ginny practically tattooed that saying on my forehead. So, fine, call it what you want, but I need to help. Don’t shut me out of this, Jonah.”

He shook his head again. “If you want to do something to protect yourself, then go to the self-defense class at the police station we talked about. But stay out of this.”

She raised her chin. “Fine. I’ll go to the class. But I’m tired of sitting back while the world stomps all over me. I have to
do
something—with or without your help.”

“Annie—” His dark brow lowered, and his eyes narrowed to slits. “If I agree to let you help, do you promise you’ll follow my instructions? No going it alone or taking unnecessary risks. Understood?”

Her pulse fluttered with anticipation and dread. “I promise.”

“Remember, these people have a lot of money at stake, and if they suspect you of meddling in the operation or feeding information to the police, they’ll kill you without asking questions.”